“Geronimo!” yelled Rodney, and swung his stick at the man with the phone. Phil brought his cane up hard between the other one’s legs. The man hit him on the cheek with his nightstick, but Phil was dodging, and he hooked the man’s leg and brought him down. Then Rodney was hitting him too, and the man was sprawling beside the other with blood coming out of his mouth. Then they ran. It wasn’t till later that Phil began to feel the pain of his broken cheekbone.
Early in the morning Stevens was awakened by the buzz of the phone.
“John, I’m sorry to trouble you, but Hal hasn’t come back, and I can’t raise him on the telephone. They don’t seem to know anything about it at security. I wonder if—”
“Of course. I’ll find out what I can and call you in a few minutes.”
Stevens put the phone down, then thumbed it on again, punched the hospital. After a moment a tired female voice answered.
“Can you tell me if you’ve admitted a patient named Harold Winter in the last few hours?”
“Let me check.” Stevens waited. “Yes, he was admitted at four am.”
“May I ask his condition?”
“He’s stable. It’s a concussion. We’ll know more in five or six hours.”
“Thank you.”
Stevens got up and began to dress. His actions were automatic; he was in no doubt of what he was going to do. He put a sap in one pocket, the flat leather case in another.
Ever since his recovery he had been in a half-pleasurable state of suspension. He had told Newland that he didn’t believe in accidents, but that was not true. Now that he no longer valued his past, he felt that his future was exquisitely, weightlessly in balance, that any puff of air might topple him one way or the other. He had been waiting with curiosity to see if fate would send him a message. Now here it was.
He knocked on Newland’s door. “Paul, it’s John.”
“Just a moment.”
Newland opened the door. He was in his wheelchair, still dressed in pajamas. “What is it, is he hurt?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. They want me to bring you down— he’s conscious, but they can’t move him.”
“Oh, God,” said Newland. His voice broke. “How did it happen?”
“They’re not sure. Somebody attacked him, down on the Boat Deck.” He closed the door behind Newland and walked beside his chair to the elevator.
“The Boat Deck?” said Newland.
"Yes, they changed his section this morning.” The elevator took them down; the door sighed open.
Stevens led him to the lifeboat bay. It was dark there; one of the ceiling lights had been broken.
“Here?” Newland asked, peering in, just before Stevens hit him with the sap. The old man slumped over; there was no blood.
Stevens wheeled him into the alcove. He took the flat plastic strip out of its case, slid it into the lock. The door opened; he pushed the chair through, closed the door behind him, then opened the second door, the one to the boat itself. The lights and air conditioning came on as they entered.
Stevens left the chair in the aisle and went forward to the pilot’s console while he pulled on his gloves. Through the thick portholes he could see wind-driven spray dashing against the hull. In his mind’s eye he saw the boat slide out of its tube, plunge into the water, bob up, then slowly drift astern. Not bad: a Viking’s funeral.
Newland was breathing slowly and shallowly. He was not dead yet, but soon.
Stevens returned to the access panel beside the door, removed it, and examined the controls. He flipped the switch marked SIGNAL OFF. He set the timer for two minutes and turned the AUTO LAUNCH control to the ON position. He left the access panel on the floor. With a last glance at Newland’s gray head, he went out the way he had come.
For two minutes nothing happened in the lifeboat. Then the timer clicked. The umbilicals were uncoupled and withdrawn. The hydraulic ram on the far side of the boat slid back, releasing the boat; compressed air blew it out of the tube. The engine fired automatically, propelling the boat to windward, away from Sea Venture.
43
There was a blinking red light on the console. Ferguson said to Bliss, “We have a door signal from Lifeboat Fifty-three.”
“Another malfunction?”
“Probably.”
“Send a person down to check it out.”
A few minutes later Ferguson exclaimed, “Now we’ve got a launch signal from the same boat!” He pressed buttons rapidly. “No status signal,” he said after a moment. “I think it’s really launched, although how that could happen—”
Nothing but rain and spray was visible in the windows or the television screens. “See if you can pick up anything on radar.”
“Too much chop,” said Ferguson. “There could be a dozen lifeboats out there and we’d never see them.”
Without waiting for orders, Stuart was speaking into her microphone. “Sea Venture calling Lifeboat Fifty-three, do you read? Come in, Lifeboat.” After a while she turned and shook her head.
Bliss stood where he was, trying to look as if he were thinking. Good God, what was he going to do? What would Nelson have done? If the lifeboat had actually been launched, either it was a malfunction, meaning there was nobody aboard, or someone had managed to launch it deliberately. In that case there was a small but measurable possibility that the passenger was carrying the parasite.
What next? There was no drill for Sea Venture to retrieve a lifeboat; the designers had assumed that if the boats were launched, it meant that Sea Venture was foundering. The only thing he could do was to launch a second lifeboat, but that meant doubling the chance that the parasite would get away. It would be a dicey thing for anyone to get from one lifeboat into another in this weather; if the first boat turned out to be empty, he might have drowned a man for nothing.
Stuart said, “Chief, Quinn reporting from Lifeboat Bay Fifty-three. The boat’s gone.”
“Get me the hospital annex.”
“Annex, Fenwick,” said a woman’s voice.
“This is Chief Bliss. Have you had a new epidemic patient in the last half hour?”
“No, sir.”
“Call me the moment you do.”
An hour went by before Stuart said, “Call for you, Chief. It’s Fenwick at the hospital annex.”
Bliss thumbed over the phone. “Yes, Ms. Fenwick?”
“Chief, you asked me to call you as soon as we had another epidemic patient. One just came in. Her name is Gearhart.”
“No mistake about the symptoms?”
“No, sir.” Her voice sounded offended.
“Thank you.” Bliss turned to Stuart. “Send this on the emergency channel. ‘Lifeboat accidentally launched from Sea Venture at’—give the position and time. ‘May have passengers aboard.’ Keep sending that until you get a reply.”
“Yes, sir.”
Newland awoke, dizzy and in pain. At first he did not know where he was or how he had got there. He was sitting in his wheelchair, wearing nothing but pajamas, and he was cold, and being rocked back and forth, and there was a throbbing pain at the side of his head: when he put his hand there, he could feel a huge, tender swelling.
Then he saw the yellow ceiling and the blue seats, and he thought, I’m in a lifeboat. But he did not know why. Hal had been hurt, that was it—the thought came back with a pain sharper than the one in his head. And he had called John Stevens. And that was all; the rest was gone. Had something happened to Sea Venture? Then why was he in a lifeboat by himself?
He drove his chair up to the console and looked out at the gray sea. The boat was rocking in the waves, throwing him from side to side with each motion. Newland managed to lever his body out of the wheelchair and into the pilot’s seat; the effort left him weak and dizzy.